San Diego FC are setting risky new records in an eye-catching MLS debut

The Guardian

31-07-2025

For a goalkeeper under pressure, there's one safe way out: turn away from the opponent, shield the ball with your body and boot it long.
A few minutes into the second half against Nashville last weekend, Pablo Sisniega did the exact opposite.
San Diego FC's backup goalkeeper trapped a bouncing pass with his sole so that the ball dangled out in front of him like a fisher's lure, then waited flat-footed outside his box while Major League Soccer's joint-leading scorer Sam Surridge hurtled toward him. At one second to impact, Sisniega held out his hand and beckoned to his 20-year-old center back Manu Duah: come closer.
A minute later, the newest – and riskiest – team in MLS had scored a winning goal.
'Talk is cheap, I understand that,' San Diego's head coach Mike Varas said when he was hired last year, before the expansion side had held a training session or even signed most of its squad, 'but we're going to be brave to play. When teams come to press us, we're going to find solutions under the press.'
True to his promise, Varas's goalkeepers have refused to play it safe this season, launching just 8.6 percent of their open-play passes more than 40 yards. According to the stats site FBref, that's not just an MLS record – it's lower than Barcelona, Man City or any other team in Europe's top five leagues going back at least as far as 2017-18.
Like most leagues around the world, MLS is in the midst of a buildup boom. Phase of play data from the new live score app Futi, which I co-founded, shows the league taking 257 touches per game this season in the buildup, a phase defined approximately as controlled open-play possession in a team's defensive half. That number has nearly doubled from 138 ten years ago.
Still, no one in MLS comes close to San Diego's 367 buildup touches per game in 2025. By some measures, they're more committed to playing out of the back than any team on record.
From a distance, San Diego's style looks like a natural continuation of soccer's decades-long arc toward more buildup play against increasingly disciplined high presses, a history written by the coaches Varas admires: Pep Guardiola, sure, but also Marcelo Bielsa, Maurizio Sarri, Roberto De Zerbi, Luis Enrique. 'So many, so many,' he says. 'I mean, I'm a football junkie.'
But while those managers work with the best players in the world, San Diego started their very first preseason six months ago with a group of '30 strangers,' as Nashville's head coach BJ Callaghan put it before last weekend's game.
For most MLS expansion teams, throwing together a team on a budget under byzantine roster rules means settling for a pragmatic playing style or none at all. At San Diego, the style came first. The club belongs to a network called Right to Dream, which began as a youth academy in Ghana, grew to include Denmark's FC Nordsjaelland, and was bought by Egypt's Mansour Group in 2021. The organization won an MLS expansion bid with San Diego to form a multi-club ownership group along with Egyptian women's team FC Masar. As part of its focus on youth development, the group has developed a distinctive style of play that emphasizes attracting pressure and playing quickly through tight spaces in the center of the pitch.
'The idea is, how can we get the opponent to be attracted to the ball, to start to release and jump forward,' Varas said, 'and then how do we recognize that moment and accelerate the play through them, around them or over them, depending on how they jump?'
San Diego take specific risks to trigger the opponent's high press, such as exchanging short 'repeating passes' with a player facing away from goal or sending the ball back to the goalkeeper and then sideways or even backwards to a center back who drops all the way to the goalline. You can see both tactics in a plot of buildup pass types that the team attempts more than other MLS sides.
'Of course, the point is not to play passes back there. The point is to beat the opponent's press, right?' Varas said. The payoff for these risky passes comes when San Diego can play out of pressure and find what they call a 'breakthrough,' running downhill between the lines with the ball at the feet of their star wingers, Anders Dreyer and Hirving Lozano. Futi's data shows that San Diego spend more time in the fast break phase of play than any team in the league, edging out Lionel Messi's Inter Miami.
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To get there, though, they have to roll the dice on inexperienced players. The makeshift back four that beat Nashville averaged just 20 years old, almost certainly the youngest starting back line in MLS history. Even at full strength, San Diego rely on a rookie goalkeeper and two teenage fullbacks, a consequence of MLS rules that encourage teams to spend big on attackers and skimp at the back.
'It was pretty interesting sitting in some of these Right to Dream meetings,' San Diego's 33-year-old sporting director Tyler Heaps said, 'explaining to them, 'Look, we're taking even more risk in MLS because we're building up with our lowest-paid players against everybody's highest-paid players, and we're not giving the ball to our highest-paid players until it's time to score goals.''
The key to finding bargains at the back was starting from Right to Dream's style and role profiles. 'We challenge our scouts not to watch exactly what the player is doing, but to try to find traits that exemplify what we want to do,' Heaps said. He used the example of the club's just-turned 19-year-old left back, who joined from the developmental league MLS Next Pro. 'Luca Bombino, in LAFC 2, was not playing the way that we played. But we saw a player that was very good in terms of solving situations under pressure.'
Bombino has since thrived enough to reportedly attract a bid from West Brom, which was rejected.
It helps that Heaps and Varas both worked for years at the US Soccer Federation, building a network of youth national team contacts who shared a love of buildup play. This summer San Diego have signed one teenage American after another, making up for the nascent club's lack of academy players by collecting future USMNT prospects like Infinity Stones.
'I'm not saying that I want the national team to play this exact way because I think in international football, it might be too risky,' Heaps said. 'But I think a lot of the skills that we are teaching our players will help any team.'
So far the risk-taking is paying off for San Diego, who sit top of the MLS Western Conference and are on pace to be the best expansion side in league history.
'In our style of play, because we put the players in such uncomfortable positions, I think we develop quite brave players, right?' Varas said. 'They have to solve a lot of tough situations. That helps develop players for the highest level.'